Happy New Year! It’s the start of 2016, and a great time to look back at your accomplishments and make plans (or resolutions!) for the year to come.

In 2015, we worked tirelessly alongside our members and partners to refine our understanding of the elements that make up a new urban practice. We released three “Pilot Projects” - new tools and resources including a guidebook on municipal innovation, an e-course on community engagement in collective impact, and a new framework for underwriting Pay For Success. In addition, we began working with Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Innovation Teams, launched the first Pay For Success “Construction Loans” and released an Assessment tool to support cross-sector partnerships.

As we gear up for 2016, Living Cities has committed to delving deep into topics like data infrastructure, community engagement and collaborative leadership. We’ve also made strides to keep racial equity and inclusion at the center of our work. These efforts are reflected in the top 10 most-read blogs of 2015. We hope you enjoys these popular reads and resources as you plan for the year to come!

Top Reads of 2015

The recent surge of interest and resources around collective impact principles has highlighted an important concern and challenge for many practitioners: given the often grasstops-heavy nature of collective impact, where does the community fit in?

Like others, Living Cities believes that genuine collective impact requires community members to be “at the table” in some way. But how and in what way community members are involved in collective impact efforts will vary case-by-case.